A university as a self-learning and open system, as an institution that permanently reflects on its self-conception and wants to communicate its identity appropriately and sustainably to its meta-, sub- and environmental systems were the requirements for the development of a new appearance of the TH Köln.
For this challenges, the university’s self-image, core values and development goals were evaluated and specified in a university-wide process in order to efficiently and successfully operationalize both the institutional identity and the communication of the university’s subsystems. This process was backed by a comprehensive discourse analysis of higher education self-understandings and a semiotically trained examination of around 350 images of German higher education institutions. Based on this, communication, design elements and rules were developed that systematically and sustainably express the self-understanding and the identity of the TH Köln. In contrast to conventional corporate identity projects, this design was not implemented once and left to its own use, but is permanently supervised, evaluated and optimized – institutional design as a self-learning process.
Professors
Prof. Dipl. Des. Andreas Wrede
Participants of the Core Project
Marius Barzynski, Anna Fitz and Benedikt Schmitz
Funded by
Presidium of TH Köln
Duration
since 2015
Publications
Barzynsk, Marius/Fitz, Anna/Schmitz, Benedikt (2015): »Drei Perspektiven, ein Fundament. Studierende der KISD entwickeln das neue Logo der Hochschule. Interview«, in: Inside out. Das Hochschulmagazin der TH Köln, Autumn, p.10-11.
Wrede, Andreas (2019), Das Erscheinungsbild der TH Köln – Basiselemente, Anwendungsregeln und Gestaltungsbeispiele. Cologne: TH Köln.
Explanatory Videos by Marius Barzynski
Die Wortmarke der TH Köln
Grafische Elemente und ihre Anwendung
Layoutkonstanten
Plakate
